


Wait a While, Eternity

by galacticproportions



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Established Relationship, Love in a season of death, M/M, Minor Character Death, Oral Sex, Reunion Sex, Trying to persuade oneself into appropriate feelings, poor communication
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-19
Updated: 2017-04-19
Packaged: 2018-10-20 19:09:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10668978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galacticproportions/pseuds/galacticproportions
Summary: Here's how it usually goes when the exigencies of the war require them to work apart: Poe goes out, deals with the situation using intelligence guided by experience, and comes back in variable condition. Finn yells at him for being reckless, they have furious sex, they settle down a bit. As holding patterns go, it's not bad.But this time Finn's the one who has to leave, and Poe's the one who has to stay.





	Wait a While, Eternity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gloss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/gifts).



> This is a companion to "Forever I'll Live Long" by Gloss, to whom this work is lovingly dedicated.

Here's how it usually goes when the exigencies of the war require them to work apart: Poe goes out, deals with the situation using intelligence guided by experience, and comes back in variable condition. Finn yells at him for being reckless, they have furious sex, they settle down a bit. Then they lurch onward to whatever task is next or, more rarely, fall asleep holding each other, Poe's arm folded across Finn's chest and his hand pressed over Finn's heart.

As holding patterns go, it's not bad. Poe's been in much worse ones, and much less sustainable ones. So far his decisions have either been productive—a captured munitions shipment, the revelation of a double-cross in the Per Lupelo system, a transport full of scared four-year-olds—or had, at minimum, the unarguable distinction of bringing him back in one piece. The sex is great, almost as good as the mix of relief and love and anger on Finn's face, the expression that tells Poe he matters and that he should try just a little harder to stay alive.

But then the shipload of recruits-not-to-say-refugees arrives from a newly conquered First Order world. Some of them want to learn how to fly, and who better than Poe Dameron to transform them from ion cannon fodder into pilots with a fighting chance of being useful before they die a fiery death? So his world contracts—hangar, atmo, orbit—and in the meantime a mission opens up that seems tailor-made for Finn's particular combination of combat training, knowledge of First Order tactics and systems thinking. It's so good that the intel team spend precious days and credits trying to determine whether it's a trap. But it seems clean, or no dirtier than anything else they might try, and worth the risk if he can pull it off.

Because of the delayed greenlight, they're left with one night together before Finn ships out. They spend the first part of it fucking around and—not arguing, exactly. “I don't need to tell you to be careful,” Poe says, leaning down over Finn with both hands braced against his shoulders as if he's pinning him, though Finn could flip him in a second, and slowly shifting his hips. They're both still mostly dressed. “I don't need to tell you that, right?”

“You're in no position to talk to me about careful.”

“What position am I in, exactly?” He's hoping that Finn _will_ roll them over and cover Poe with his weight and maybe start the more aggressively naked stage of the evening, but Finn doesn't take the cue. He sighs, and pulls Poe's head down into a kiss, which is almost as good, but a little too sweet. “C'mon,” Poe says, “leave me some marks or something.”

“You're being weird,” Finn says to the top of Poe's head, the timbre of his voice traveling up through Poe's chest, his lower hand tracing up and down Poe's spine, circling the knobs and smoothing the bands of muscle on either side like he's trying to get the creases out. “Even for you. Do I act like this when you're about to go out? I don't think I do. And I have _way_ more reason to be worried.”

“Hey. I always come back, don't I? You're right, I'm being weird. I'm sorry.”

“It's okay,” Finn says, and Poe wishes he meant _It's going to be okay,_ but Finn never says what he isn't sure of. They kiss more, and Poe tries to meet Finn's gentleness, his methodical thoroughness. If this is what he wants on their last night together—for a _while,_ their last night for a _while,_ damn it—then he should have it. And Poe gets into it because he always does, because what's not to like about Finn's big hands and smooth skin and wonderful mouth, the wildness of his expression and the stutter of his breath when he's close, what's not to like about being held down by one of those hands at his throat and jacked with the other—not sweet now, no, he understands, _deliberate—_ until he sees soft dark explosions behind his eyes and when they clear the fond and slightly smug face of the man he _okay,_ _fine,_ loves looking down at him? “Hey,” he says again, softer this time.

“Hey.” Finn leans over, kisses Poe's forehead. “Want me to clean you off?” Poe's stomach is draped and crossed with lines of spunk from both of them, caught and smeared in the hairs around his navel.

“I can do it. Just gimme a second.” What he'd really like is to just stay like this, wear Finn under his clothes, not bathe until he comes back. He knows that'd be a little much. He won't do it. Probably.

“You'll come back,” Poe says, just before they fall asleep.

When it's Poe leaving, he always says he'll come back. He assumes Finn knows that this is shorthand: _If I don't come back, it'll be because I couldn't. If I don't come back, remember that coming back was what I wanted most to do. “Back” is where you are._ Finn's not stupid; he's the furthest from stupid than any sentient Poe's ever met. Surely he knows what this means, knows Poe's not really asking for a promise Finn can't keep. That nobody can keep, in war or even out of it. But all Finn will say is, “I'll try.”

 

*

 

Poe's own squadron goes up without him, and then with him, a little differently configured, as the rookies learn to fly. The run time of Finn's mission is between 20 and 25 days. 35 is when, if there's no word, they'll decide whether to attempt an extraction. And while nobody says this, 45 days is when they'll add to Finn's file the symbol that means _MISSING PRESUMED DEAD._

Every night, Poe dreams the same thing: seeing Finn from a distance in a crowded place, the mess or a street on Coruscant or a market square or one of the all-night festivals on Yavin. Recognizing the set of Finn's shoulders and the ease of his walk, pushing through the crowd to get close to him, only to see a stranger and to know that he's been fooling himself, that he'll never see Finn again.

He wakes and scrubs at his eyes with his fists, irritated at his subconscious for coming up with something so _obvious,_ for fuck's sake. He shaves and fixes his hair and goes over to the mess, drinks caf with Kare and Jess and a hydroponic botanist-turned-medic named Poalli, the newest inductee to their ever-rotating menage. “You look dapper,” Jess says, making a swipe at his head, which he ducks. “Your man coming back today?”

“Not for another tenday, best case.”

“Who you all dressed up for, then?”

He's dressed up to hide the fact that he feels like shit and knows it's stupid. They're apart all the time, and sometimes he knows what Finn's doing and sometimes he doesn't. Usually he's too busy, too flying, too dodging, too shooting to think about it much. The rookies are exhausting and time-consuming, but they don't fill every crevice of his mind with speed and reflex. The decisions he makes about them don't complete themselves before he knows that they're decisions; they linger, making him feel old and slow and lonely.

Around Finn's sixteenth day out, the squadrons engage a scattering of TIE fighters near a contested moon. They hit one of the rookies, Ursula, she's called, and her own engines blow her into ash and frozen pieces. Poe's dry-eyed back at base as he writes the comm to the sister listed as next of kin, who lives in First Order territory and may never see it. When he imagines Finn's face it's flat, like a holoprojection in a too-bright room.

That night he doesn't sleep at all, paces, stays sober. Writes flight plans, biting the end of the stylus. Deliberately doesn't go outside in case the sky, too, is flat and lifeless, hollowed out.

Day twenty. Day twenty-two. Kare's team pulls off a decisive strike, no Resistance losses. Day twenty-three. Poe has to fight for the kindness and warmth that usually comes so easily to him. His voice grates, rings false, but the rookies don't seem to be able to tell the difference. The dreams have stopped. Sleep is a blank, an interruption in waiting.

On day twenty-seven, Finn comes back.

Poe doesn't know about it for a few hours. BB-8 wakes him and he eats something, because you have to eat something. He orders up a maintenance check, goes to visit Uy Tau Tau the rookie in medbay and walks Aliss the other rookie to her mindhealer appointment. He stops by the Intelligence offices to upload background on a handful of potential targets, and hauls it off to his quarters to gnaw on a ration bar and try to rake up an opinion on which to hit next, which they'll probably ignore. The message to report to the command center comes through at 1640 with no further explanation. He stoops to put his boots on and only realizes when his fingertips meet leather that he never took them off.

Finn is leaning forward on a console, drawing in the air with a fingertip, mid-explanation.

Poe remembers when Finn was physically incapable of leaning. When his gestures were mainly small ones at hip height, trooper handsign, easily screened by the body. When only situations of the greatest urgency would draw an explanation out of him. During Finn's first days away, Poe occasionally indulged himself by imagining their reunion: yelling at Finn the way Finn yells at him—regardless, Poe tells himself, of the riskiness of what Poe's actually done--or embraces and deep kisses in full view of half the base. In his imagination, he's been angry and yearning and jovial and matter-of-fact. In none of these scenarios did the bridge of his nose tighten and his sinuses fill and his eyes sting when he caught sight of Finn's profile, and then the quick turn to full face as Finn realizes that someone else is in the room, and then the smile.

“C'mere,” Finn says. “I was just trying to show everybody the sector layout and the spots where we've _supposedly_ created an opportunity.” Poe crosses the room like a puppet on horizontal strings, and Finn draws him in with an arm around his waist, as though everyone in the Resistance held their lover close while planning the next phase of a military engagement.

Finn smells like different soap and different air. Poe's as angry as he's ever been with anyone except himself. It's stupid, it's stupid, he doesn't know why, and even in the midst of it he's not fool enough to shake off Finn's touch. “--evacuation protocol,” Finn's saying. “And ask them to help set it up. If they balk at it, then they're willing to suffocate and genetically compromise the people they say they're trying to free, and we'll know something's off.”

This apparently seems sound to everyone. Ackbar signs off on it; there are a few more questions; everyone rustles and shifts toward the door. Finn turns his body toward Poe's, smiling close. “I have to stop by medbay,” he says, and adds quickly, “nothing major, I just want them to do a scan. There was some weird shit on that planet. And then I have to come back here, once they've digested what I just told them. Meet you back at the room? When are you done today?”

“1930 or so, if nothing goes sour.”

“Nice,” Finn says. “Early. Meet me for dinner then.” They have a table they favor, at one end of the mess near the door. Poe nods, and his frustration and disorientation are so strong that he almost doesn't lean in to receive Finn's kiss. But he does, just in time.

It does help. Finn's mouth is warm and lush always, and right now it's something to drink from, to settle into. _Welcoming,_ Poe thinks, and tries to transform it, give it back: _Welcome home._ “Probably shouldn't've done that before the scan,” Finn says, but not like he's really worried, and then: “Poe. Hey. Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Don't worry. I'm good. I'll see you later.” It's not true, none of it is true, except the “see you later” part. Which, Poe tells himself, is the most important.

 

*

 

They meet up and eat rehydrated stew, and Finn tells a little more about the mission over the burble and hum of voices all around them. Poe gets interested in spite of himself in the onplanet tensions and machinations that raised Finn's doubts, setting off his combination of Force sensitivity and good sense, and his description of the supposed First Order double who was his main contact. When it's Poe's turn to tell what he's been doing, he does so flatly and distractedly, and says again that he's good, he's fine.

“You're _not_ fine,” Finn says when they're back in their room. “I heard about Ursula.”

“That's not what I'm not fine about.” Great—now on top of everything else, he gets to confront that it's not grief for the end of a sentient life that's motivating him, but uglier, more shameful feelings. Sitting and staring at the reports but mostly at the wall, he had time to figure out what those are, and he sickens himself: there's a part of him that wants Finn to be the one who waits, the one who suffers, feeling their bond constrict his guts with fear, imagining its permanent breaking. Not the one who leaves and comes back fine, apparently unshaken, ready to go again. At the very least Finn could have the courtesy to fall apart. “I'm being an asshole,” he says. “You don't need to worry about it.”

“Of course I need to worry about it,” Finn says reasonably. He takes off boots, tunic, pants, lies back on the bed in drawers and singlet. Stretches, and Poe reacts predictably, dick twitching, guts yearning toward him. Then Finn pats the mattress, so _relaxed,_ so different from the way he's been the times that Poe's returned.

He lies down anyway, curls into Finn's chest, cheek against shoulder. “I hated it,” he says. “When you were gone.”

“Yeah, I wasn't crazy about it either. Especially not knowing what was going on. I figured they were gonna send you up at least once, almost every strategy that was on the table when I left had that as a component.”

“We did. Go up.” He can't say what he feels, because he shouldn't be feeling it.

“I was in cover,” Finn says softly. “Every time I thought of you, I had to turn it off. I couldn't think _at all_ about where you were or what you were doing or how dashing and stupid it probably was, because I wasn't supposed to have anything to do with you. I wasn't even—my ID chip was for a single man, did you know that?” He turns Poe's face for a kiss and Poe lets him, meets him. “I wasn't supposed to be missing anyone, and I was missing you so bad.”

“You're here now.”

“I am.” Finn kisses him again, and it's so tender, lazy almost, like they've got forever, that Poe bursts out with it: “Why are you so _calm_?”

Finn pulls back a little, and makes the face that means he's looking inward, taking the question seriously. “'Cause it went well?” he thinks aloud. “Got what I went for, came back in one piece?” His expression shifts, lips part briefly, his “got it” face, the one Poe loves more than almost any other. “ _Because_ I'm here. And 'cause you are.”

“But when I come back--”

“Oh,” Finn says. “I see where this is going.” Of course he does, he always does. “Are you angry? Mad at me?”

“Yeah, but I keep telling you, it's nothing. It's not for a good reason. You're careful, so it's not even as good a reason as you have, when I--”

“When you do something dumb?”

“When I take a _calculated risk._ Right.” They've been touching each other lightly, loosely, this whole time, as if they were entirely at ease, and Poe gradually realizes that it's coming true, that the anger is dissipating as the Finn in his arms replaces the Finn in his mind. Talking to the real Finn is possible. Listening to him is possible.

Kissing him and groping the living daylights out of him is also possible, and Poe applies himself to this now. Finn groans, says, “Did you wanna talk more?” in the voice of a man who is deliriously hoping the answer will be no.

“Nah,” Poe says. “We can come back to it. If you really want.”

“I'm gonna believe you that it's not important.” He's thumbing open the fasteners on Poe's shirt, tracing the outline of Poe's dick through his pants. Slides down and mouths through the fabric until Poe gets impatient, undresses himself and pulls Finn back down to him, chest to chest, with a little more force than usual. Finn makes a surprised noise, and they rock together, hump and thrust against each other. “I just need you,” Poe says after a while, and Finn says, “How do you want me?” and Poe says, “No, I mean--”

“Oh,” Finn says, hushed all of a sudden, “yeah, me too,” and then there's more kissing, and Poe doesn't mind the tenderness so much anymore. “I mean,” he says eventually, “I'd also be into sucking your dick, if you want that,” and Finn laughs and laughs and says, “I don't mind.”

They move to the edge of the bed and they're back how they should be, Poe kneeling between Finn's thighs while Finn fucks his mouth and cries out, Poe kissing Finn's belly on his way back up, standing while Finn takes a turn sucking him off with both hands clamped on Poe's hips to hold him still. Maybe there will be a mark or two, tomorrow.

“We should sleep,” Poe says, when they're lying next to each other again, making out lazily, tasting like a mix of each other. “I have to go out again in two days and there's a lot of shit to decide tomorrow morning.”

“Yeah, I know. It was my idea.” Finn names it calmly, this other part of what they do: what each of them brings back could send the other to his death. The reminder dissolves the last traces of Poe's fury, at least for now. Talking and listening: both possible, but only if they both come back.

It's not sweet and it's not ugly, not pure and not terrible: needing each other, depending on each other. It's layered and tangled; it pulls, it chokes, it holds them up. And maybe in two days—or maybe two years, ten, or even fifty—it will break forever. But right now Poe can lie in it, with Finn, and rest.

 


End file.
